This is going to be an expansion of my other thread in which I asked about rare or key coins. As a starting point in determining the relative rarity of a coin, mintage numbers are the used. This approach is often misleading. When browsing through the latest Red Book, mintage numbers are given for each coin. Sounds good on the surface. What these numbers indicate are the number of coins with that date struck at that particular mint. What is does not do is give an indication of what is still available. If we use the mintage number alone, many coins can be seen as rare. Examples: The 1877 Indian Cent has a mintage of 852,500. Certainly the key in the series. The 1909-S Indian Cent has a mintage of 309,000. Yet the 1877 has near double the current price tag. The 1914-D Lincoln has a mintage of 1,193,000. A Key in the series. The 1931-S has a mintage of 866,000, yet is considered only as a semi key. Selling for much less. The 1893-CC Morgan has a mintage of 677,000. The 1899-P Morgan has a mintage of 330,000. Yet the 93-CC is sold near 10 times the price. Many factors make up the difference when it comes to rarity. One is surviving examples. A great number of coins were melted during silver rushes over the course of the years. As silver rose above melt value, people melted all they could get a hold of. The US Mint did this often also. Another factor is the great Morgan holdings sold during the great GSA sales. These dollars sat in treasury vaults for 80 years. Many semi key dates became common during these sales. Collectors tended to collect the first and last in a given series, and oddities as they came into fashion. During the discovery of the famed 1955 Doubled Die Lincoln, these coins were being sold at less than a dollar. Once the demand rose, the value rose with it. A few series have the added bonus of being highly collected. Demand for Lincoln Cents and Morgan Dollars have driven their values much higher than most others. A top set of Three Cent silver pieces can be put together for the price of a single 1895 Morgan. Many have mintages in the few hundred thousands. Yet because of their collectibility, are considered common. The following is a short list of mintage numbers that correspond with common dated coins. 1855 3 Cent Silver Mintage 139,000 1864 3 Cent Silver Mintage 12,470 1876 3 Cent Nickel Mintage 162,000 1888 3 Cent Nickel Mintage 41,083 1846 Seated Dime Mintage 31,300 All can be bought cheaply in circulated grades. Many for under $25 Just goes to show what mintage numbers can mean.
For anything silver and gold, does it stand to reason that melting is the number one wildcard for scarcity in condition quality and availability?
No. It certainly would be for a 1933 double eagle but not for an 1891 dime. There has never been heavy melting of any US silver coins minted since the mid-1850's except for the Pittman act which melted silver dollars the the treasury melts of 1968/9. This latter melt was not extrenmely large but did remove the silver coin from circulation which was still there in '68. There was an extensive series of smaller melts which did melt a large number of coins. These were mostly very common coins in very common conditions and this melting did not seriously affect the surviving numbers of any coin in any collectible condition. There were a few coins which might have been more greatly threatened such as coins like a circ '40-D quarter or original rolls of '68 and '69-D half dollars. It's attrition which destroys coins. They run into mishaps from fires, floods, misplacement, hammers, trains and myriad other sources. High grade silver and gold often exist only because of the propensity of people to hoarde things of value in good time and bad. This has protected them from the ravages of time and circulation. edited to add three sentences to first paragraph.
It tends to be base metal coins which are more widely melted. When these are demonetized or withdrawn from circulation they are typically melted and sold for the metal. There are many 20th century silver coins which have been melted but most are world coins, not US.
Sometimes yes - sometimes no. The number of coins that survive today for any given denomination, date and mm is dependent on many things. Certainly, in the case of gold and silver coins, melting can have a significant impact. But what can also have a significant impact is the economic atmosphere of the contemporary time period. Hoarding by the general populace is a reason that many coins survive today. Only the coins were not hoarded because of collector interest - they were hoarded because they were gold and silver. It's been that way since the beginning of time. There have been many periods in the history of this nation that the general populace was convinced the govt. might go under. And during those times people hoarded gold & silver. Silver dollars never really circulated - neither did gold coins. Silver dollars sat in bank vaults because nobody wanted them for the most part. Gold did the same for a different reason - it was used primarily to make up a bank's reserves. But there have always been collectors, and when it became known that a given coin had a low mintage collectors were quick to pounce upon it and remove these coins from circulation. Often in the very year the coin was issued. This was much more common with the lower denomination coins than dollars and gold - still it happened. This is why it is much easier to find certain coins in higher grades than it is in circulated condition. And for some of the older coins - changes in the value of gold and silver played a part also. If the relationship in the value of gold to silver changed - then people would either dump or hoard one or the other. So there are many things that paly a part in why some coins survive today while others do not. It just depends.
Another major factor which determines rarity is the survival rate of a particular coin in a specific grade. As an example, the 1884-S Morgan Dollar in common circulated grades is no more expensive that any of the common dates in the series. An MS 63 example though, is likely to set you back $25,000 or more assuming you can find one. In the case of the 1884-S Morgan, the lack of high quality surviving examples occurred as the direct result of commercial demand - the majority of the Morgans produced that year at San Fransisco went directly into commerce. Most of the rest were dolled out in 1926 and again during the 1930s, and also found there way into circulation. The few high quality survivors probably came from a small number of bags released by the mint in 1950s.
